Galactic Melt

Ghostly; 2011

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It hasn't even been five months since Ghostly re-released Com Truise's formative Cyanide Sisters EP, and already Princeton, N.J.'s Seth Haley is back with a full-length debut. That Galactic Melt has been pretty much in the can for that entire time tells you something about Haley's formidable work ethic; in addition to Truise, he operates under at least three other pseudonyms, none as fully-realized but each as prodigious.

Haley's rapid-fire turnover plays incredibly well on the Internet. He's something of a cottage industry, dispensing original tracks, remixes, podcasts, and accompanying boxfresh graphic designs to his blog readership and Twitter followers with impressive regularity. By capitalizing on the immediacy of the formats, he's also charting his own evolution in realtime. When he writes, "I thought I'd switch it up a little" in reference to a remix he's just posted for Ana Lola Roman's "Klutch", he's acknowledging that his listeners know what he means by "it," and how it's been switched; everything is laid out with a clear progression, one small evolution to the next.

The comparative slow lane of a regular label release schedule, though, has a habit of slowing down the flow of music, crumpling up its timelines and deforming expectations. This usually doesn't matter to the end listener; what's new to our ears is good as new. But since Galactic Melt sounds more like a polite and brotherly companion piece to Cyanide Sisters than it does a proper follow-up, it's hard not to feel like the tactic of waiting to market has robbed Haley of some of some of his momentum.

Part of the problem is Cyanide Sisters. As debut EPs go, it was an accomplished enough turn to raise questions about what Truise might do for an encore. The answer, as it happens, was, well, a slightly more muted version of the same. Don't get me wrong: with its staccato, bonus level synth stabs, keening psychedelia and 1980s-drenched drum sounds, Melt is still very identifiably Truise. But with the exception of the banging double whammy of "VHS Sex" and "Cathode Girls", there's nothing much here to suggest that Truise has upped his game in any meaningful way. Whether you consider that a disappointment will depend on how much mileage you get out of Haley in this mode.